Beat Avenue

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About Beat Avenue

Product Description This is the hard-hitting, ground-breaking, guitar-driven double CD from one of our great singer-songwriters, Eric Anderson. This album includes the hypnotic 26-minute title track describing 24 hours spent in San Francisco with legendary Beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Laswerence Ferlinghetti and others on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Review "Andersen works within and without traditional song frameworks, wielding a vivid poetic skill and a fearless approach to songwriting." -- United Press International, February 28, 2003 "Andersens most ambitious album, a 90-minute tour de force that encapsulates his musical and lyrical concerns over a lifetime." -- All Music Guide, 2003 "This ambitious epic underscores the vitality of a vastly underrated troubadour." -- Mother Jones, February, 2003 "Very few songwriters have built a body of work as consistently strong as Mr. Andersens...Compelling." -- The New York Times, April 27, 2003 "Vibrant sound and bracing performances are hallmarks of an excellent album." -- Sing Out!, 2003 About the Artist Although he arrived in New Yorks Greenwich Village during the urban folk explosion of the early 60s, song poet Eric Andersens personal, introspective compositions steered clear of topical protest and traditional folk songs, setting the template for the singer-songwriter movement that blossomed later in the decade and still flourishes today. The late Robert Shelton presciently described one of Erics earliest compositions as "typical of the new language and poetic patterns of what will one day be called an Eric Andersen song." The distinctive qualities of "an Eric Andersen song" have been recognized for almost 40 years by music fans and fellow musicians Eric has recorded more than 20 albums of original material, and his songs have been covered by artists including Judy Collins, Fairport Convention, Peter, Paul & Mary, the Grateful Dead, Linda Ronstadt, Rick Nelson and many more. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1943, Andersen grew up in Buffalo, N.Y., where he taught himself to play guitar and piano. As a teenager, he formed folk groups and immersed himself in the writings of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and "Beat Generation" writers and poets. Eric hitchhiked west to San Francisco in 1963 to seek his Beat idols and started performing original songs in local coffeehouses. An encounter with the Beats on the day of President John F. Kennedys assassination inspired his cinematic 26-minute song epic, "Beat Avenue," the title track of his 2003 double-CD. The rootless freedom of life on the road and the experience of mingling with the Beats were to become major forces on his life and work. "Discovered" by Tom Paxton in a Bay Area coffeehouse, Andersen returned to New York City at his urging. By the spring of 64, Eric was playing clubs in the Village, creating and recording some of his best-known songs "Violets of Dawn," "Thirsty Boots" and "Come to My Bedside." Andersens career suffered a heartbreaking near-miss in 1967 when a potential signing to Beatles manager Brian Epsteins roster collapsed with Epsteins death. Ensuing decades found the peripatetic Andersen playing concerts and festivals around the world and recording a series of major-label albums. Erics closest encounter with a wide, non-folk audience came in 1972 with the release of his "Blue River" album on Columbia, his best-selling record to date, which was subsequently tagged as "the best example of the 70s singer-songwriter movement" by the Rolling Stone Record Guide. Cruelly, the tapes for the follow-up "Stages" album that would have consolidated Erics growing audience were mysteriously "lost" by the label. Belatedly found and issued in remastered and augmented form in 1991 as "Stages: The Lost Album," the album won the New York Music Award as "Best Folk Album of the Year" and was called "a masterwork" in Rolling Stone. The last half of the 70s saw Eric releasing two albums on Arista and performing at